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A short aside on grammar. On starting into my master’s degree, I decided it was finally time for me to engage and properly understand and implement good grammar in my writing. It’s certainly not like I feel that I was taught this at school. But, then again, it may have been taught when my mind was simply elsewhere. That happened rather a lot.
So, of course, I bought a book. That is my go-to way of learning stuff like this. I bought the Collins Good Grammar.
There’s a learning style that I have with new subject matter that I have found quite helpful which is that I buy an introductory book, read parts entirely at random before subsequently working my way systematically from beginning to end. It allows me an overview of what I am learning and where the initial learning is going. It works for me.
I think I tried that with Collins Good Grammar but I also think it didn’t work. Towards the end of my master’s, I decided to have a go at the methodical approach to the book: start from the beginning as it were because it’s a very good place to start.
Which includes:
And so it does, to a point. Learning and obeying all the rules of grammar won’t automatically bestow excellence on your speech and writing; but completely ignoring them will almost certainly consign you to inarticulate semi-literacy.
Does being good at grammar help you in life? Thousands of people who hold down highly-paid top jobs can hardly spell or compose a coherent letter without help. Even The Times, regarded as a paragon of grammatical certitude, slips up with comforting regularity: ‘According to the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit,’ it reported recently, ‘one in four 16- to 20-year-olds have reading problems and more than one third have trouble with spelling.’ (the first have should be has, to agree with its antecedent one in four). Embarrassingly, the slip-up occurred in an editorial on the need for the rigorous teaching of grammar.
Are we being picky, or what? The danger is, if we allow seemingly minor transgressions to go unnoticed, we could find ourselves grappling with a leaky language system reeking of confusion and ambiguity.
I may be overreacting but I find the above to be exceedingly arrogant. Plenty of people manage to write perfectly well without a studied approach to to grammar.
What exacerbates this arrogance and renders it utterly foolish is that the author gives primacy to grammatical pernicketiness over accuracy and the communication of meaning. When referring to the one in four 16- to 20-year-olds above, ‘The Times’ is referring to somewhere around eight-hundred-thousand young people. And they have reading problems. As far as I am concerned, the plural “one in four” = c.800,000 people and the pronoun should be plural.
I’m willing to live and let live. I’m also willing to admit my own complete inconsistency in the matter. I tend to think of hypothetical entities such as a band or a club as the people who make up the band and or club and will use ‘it’ and ‘they’ rather randomly to refer to the group actions. However, the lack of acknowledgement above of the plural nature of ‘one in four’ led me to give up on that book and on the idea of studying grammar. It is, in fact, one of a few books that went straight to the recycling bin rather than the donation bag because I wouldn’t want to inflict it or its consequences on the rest of the world.
Along the way, I discovered the difference between descriptive and prescriptive practices in linguistics and grammar. Described in Wikipedia currently:
In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power.
There’s probably not much need to say that I am not a fan of control of the shared language by ‘figures of power’. English is an anarchic language, an evolved beast: that is to say it is ultimately driven by usage, not dictated by academics. That doesn’t always produce the best results or provide us with the fullest range of meaning we might possibly have. But for me, I try to write well and don’t worry too much about grammatical correctness. It’s what I mean that matters. Hopefully, that comes across.
Another annoyance off my chest. And hopefully, some intellectual freedom for someone who reads this.
🙂